Missing, a mystery; unknown, a tragedy

Published: Wednesday, October 3, 2012 at 10:49 AM.

There are more than 40,000 sets of unidentified human remains marked as John and Jane Does in cemeteries and medical examiners’ offices all around this country.

Even more poignantly, those numbers include bodies that have been cremated or disposed of by other means — and that’s just a good faith estimate. The true figures could be much higher.

In fact, if all of America’s unknown dead were counted, the statistics could easily populate a good-sized city.

An alarming number of unidentified remains remain that way. Even good investigators, diligence and hard work don’t necessarily bring favorable results when someone trips across a body.

The Doe Network (www.doenetwork.org) lists 75 cases in North Carolina of unidentified male and females with information on remains discovered as long ago as the mid-1970s and still unnamed. These are rare cases, to be sure, but not singular and not far away. Pitt, Wayne, Onslow, Pender and Carteret are included in a list that shares not only a quality of mystery but also the saddest part of tragedy, the sadness of not knowing.

On Nov. 10, the Greensboro Police Department will offer an opportunity for families of missing North Carolina residents to move their chances of finding their loved ones a little closer to reality.

On that day, police will do mass DNA screenings of families with missing loved ones. The results of those screenings will be sent to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, which retains DNA profiles of missing persons entered by police, medical examiners and coroners all across the United States.

There are more than 40,000 sets of unidentified human remains marked as John and Jane Does in cemeteries and medical examiners’ offices all around this country.

Even more poignantly, those numbers include bodies that have been cremated or disposed of by other means — and that’s just a good faith estimate. The true figures could be much higher.

In fact, if all of America’s unknown dead were counted, the statistics could easily populate a good-sized city.

An alarming number of unidentified remains remain that way. Even good investigators, diligence and hard work don’t necessarily bring favorable results when someone trips across a body.

The Doe Network (www.doenetwork.org) lists 75 cases in North Carolina of unidentified male and females with information on remains discovered as long ago as the mid-1970s and still unnamed. These are rare cases, to be sure, but not singular and not far away. Pitt, Wayne, Onslow, Pender and Carteret are included in a list that shares not only a quality of mystery but also the saddest part of tragedy, the sadness of not knowing.

On Nov. 10, the Greensboro Police Department will offer an opportunity for families of missing North Carolina residents to move their chances of finding their loved ones a little closer to reality.

On that day, police will do mass DNA screenings of families with missing loved ones. The results of those screenings will be sent to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, which retains DNA profiles of missing persons entered by police, medical examiners and coroners all across the United States.

NamUs, a government agency that grew out of an effort to build an alliance between families, missing persons advocates and the professions that deal with them, welcomes DNA analyses that can help it put names to the growing numbers of remains on its databases. For the families of the missing, it’s another avenue to search for their loved ones.

DNA analysis for relatives of missing persons accomplished through the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification (UN-CHI) and NamUs costs participants absolutely nothing.

And for medical examiners, police investigators and families, the payoff can be a big one: Finding an identity, getting key evidence in a case or closing it and, most important of all, bringing loved ones home to where they belong.

The Greensboro P.D has a good idea. Here’s hoping more North Carolina law enforcement agencies follow its lead.